Information Retrieval from Microblogs During Disasters: In the Light of IRMiDis Task

Abstract

In last few years ,microblogging sites like Twitter have been evolved as a repository of critical situational information during various mass emergencies. However, messages posted on microblogging sites often contain non-actionable information such as sympathy and prayer for victims. Moreover, messages sometimes contain rumors and overstated facts. In such situations, identification of tweets that report some relevant and actionable information is extremely important for effective coordination of post-disaster relief operations. Thus, efficient IR methodologies are required to identify such critical information. Additionally, cross-verification of such critical information is a practical necessity to ensure the trustworthiness. To this end, we organized the 'Information Retrieval from Microblogs during Disasters (IRMiDis)' shared task with the FIRE conference for consecutive 3 years (2016, 2017 and 2018). In each year's track, we have given task associated with extraction of a specific situational information to aid post-disaster relief operation and asked the participants to propose methodologies. Our present study provides a brief description of the tasks (research problem) given in these tracks, a summary of methodologies of all submitted runs and finally a brief description of our proposed methodologies to address the research problems of IRMidis track.